The patterns of the verbs under analysis here are provided in Table 15 for 19th century CanE and in Table 16 for Present-day CanE and rely on the functional labels ‘BC’, ‘CE’, etc. that were explained in Table 3. Instead of assuming that all verbs investigated sim- ply govern an indirect and a direct object when used in the pattern ‘V – NP1 – NP2’, the function BC has been assigned to any NP1 that cannot become the subject of a first passive. Any non-passivisable NP2 is analysed as a CE. The extensive-transitive pattern
‘O – CE’ is most typical of the verbs investigated though the S-sub data conform to it more uniformly. It is the historically newer pattern that reflects both the increasing admissibility of first passives and the declining use of second passives. It contrasts with the historically older pattern ‘BC – CE/O’ illustrated by bring, whose first passive is still close to ungrammatical (though perhaps on its way towards the newer pattern). The historical changes from Middle English to Present-day English for the verbs investi- gated can basically be described as (a) a gradual substitution of a BC by a passivisable
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Passives of so-called ‘ditransitives’ in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English 173 O in the slot of NP1 (based on Visser’s lists of first passives (1973: 2142–2149)); and (b) a decrease in passivisability of NP2 (at least between around 1850 and today), inter- preted here as a gradual replacement of an O by a CE. The C19 analyses below list send, deny and sell as still exhibiting the old pattern (see the third pattern headed by give in Table 15). This is justified because they showed no first passives in C19, while these were well attested in S-full. Quite in line with this, Visser (1973: 2148f) lists the first passives of these verbs as 20th century innovations. It follows then, that these verbs are listed with the new pattern headed by give in Table 16.
Table 15. Major syntactic patterns of double-participant verbs in C19
Predicate Scope, restrictions
give [O Ernest] [CE some congenial occupation]
(extensive-transitive) also: offer, teach
no second passives when NP1 is lexical
give [O1 her] [O2 the best] (ditransitive)
also: show (show him no mercy), offer, teach NP2 = O only if NP1 is pronominal, more common than in Present-day CanE bring [BC me] [O my hood and mantle]
(benefactive-transitive)
also: deny, send, sell (no first passives attested;
different from give, show, offer, teach)
passivises only with pronominal NP1 (two second pron. passives attested in C19)
bring [BC sudden and certain disaster]
[PC to Great Britain] NP1 is passivisable
give [O royal assent] [PC to the bill]
send [O a message] [PC to the assembly] first passives possible, PC is frequently locative with send
Table 16. Major syntactic patterns of double-participant verbs in S-sub and S-full
Predicate Scope, restrictions
give [O aboriginals] [CE the right to vote]
(extensive-transitive)
also: deny, send, offer, teach, assign also with some idiomatic patterns: give [O Petrowski] [CE permission to attend the convention]
NP1 is lexical
give [NPpron/O them] [O no choice] (ditransitive)
also: offer NP2 = O only if NP1 is pronominal,
rare even then bring [BC Canadians/them] [CE a steady diet]
(extensive-intransitive)
bring is the only verb investigated behaving like buy
first passive almost non-existent, no second passive either
bring [O a steady diet] [PC to Canadians/them]
(also give, show; different prepositions possible:
confuse [O student ratings] [PC with accountability])
different from the direct construction because NP1 is passivisable
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174 Matthias L.G. Meyer
With some exceptions such as give, double-object analyses are largely restricted to the Present-day use of verbs like give, sell or deny that permit both first passives and second pronominal passives. Note that the term ‘ditransitive’ in Tables 15 and 16 only applies to verbs allowing both their complements to become the subject of the passive.
It must thus not be understood in the much broader sense in which it is used by Quirk et al. (1985: §16.55f).
Consider some further structures. Transitive prepositional verbs such as ‘[Vprep care for] [O patients]’ have an affinity with true double-object structures such as make [O1(effective/good/proper/no) use] of [O2 computer analysis] in that both straightfor- wardly allow for a second passive and unlike give-type verbs thus take a second object.
Quite typically, both types involve some degree of idiomaticity or lexicalisation. For make use of, CanE strongly prefers the first passive (with 21 occurrences in S-full), while the second prepositional passive is only attested twice. The two types are illus- trated in (22) and (23) respectively:
(22) … effective use was made of computer analysis …
(S-full, 2004, Can. J. of Physiology and Pharmacology, academic) (23) … the most severe expressions that vexation and displeasure could suggest
were made use of to abash them for their bad behaviour …
(S-full, 2003, B.C. Historical News, magazine) For take advantage of, the preference is reversed: S-full has two first and seven second passives. More generally, Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 289) consider double passives possible for make use of, pay attention/tribute to, take advantage of and others. I did not investigate their frequencies in S-full but Jensen (2013: 21) found the following frequencies for first/second passives in COCA: take care of 1/959, take advantage of 2/182, make use of 28/10. Given these data, only make use of truly appears to have two passives in AmE.
With some dual-complement verbs a prepositional construction is now (partly or exclusively) preferred over an older direct construction. Rohdenburg (2007: 219) lists banish, dismiss, present and others as cases in point and provides evidence from British and American authors born between 1799 and 1869 that present gradually gave up the older pattern present sb sth in favour of present sb with sth. He shows the change to be fairly complete in BrE but incomplete in AmE (2009a: 205). The observed change is paralleled in the Strathy corpus by eight attested direct passives of present in the direct construction as opposed to 208 instances of prepositional passives. These additional data show that this particular change only affects the nature and status of the second constituent (a CE is replaced by a PC) but does not affect the object status of the first constituent.
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Passives of so-called ‘ditransitives’ in nineteenth century and present-day Canadian English 175
7. Conclusion
In CanE, as we have seen, first passives have been strongly on the increase since the 19th century, while second passives have been losing ground to the alternative prepositional construction, though they remain an option with pronominal ben- eficiaries. With lexical beneficiaries, they are ungrammatical in 19th century and Present-day CanE. Their sparseness in Visser’s (1973: 2153) extensive list of histori- cal attestations of this type, the absence of second lexical passives of give, hand, offer, send, show and teach in both Shakespeare and the Helsinki corpus (see Section 2) suggests that they are also rare in Standard English generally and have never been common in its history. The COCA data considered in Section 4.2 suggest that they are also close to non-existent in Present-day AmE. Exceptions beyond the verbs investigated cannot be excluded; afford notably allows second lexical passives and calls for an examination of other verbs. With pronominal beneficiaries, second pas- sives show a statistically significant drop in the C19 and the S-sub data that is mir- rored in the AmE data for show retrieved from the COCA and the COHA corpora (see Section 5.1).
The relative increase of first passives should be seen against the general drop of passives that was observed for the entire 20th century in BrE and AmE and that is also reflected in the Canadian data investigated. While the general decline of passives may be largely due to “a plethora of attacks on the passive in twentieth-century style guides”
as suggested by Smith & Leech (2013: 93), first passives have been gaining ground against prepositional passives, although the former were frowned upon by language purists and grammarians in the 19th and the 20th centuries (see John Hart’s early blame for the construction quoted in Section 2). Functional reasons were assumed to be responsible for the rise of first passives. The first is the tendency noted by Jespersen that English prefers constructions that place information about personal participants as early as possible. It is only in first passives such as I was given the book that the person or beneficiary is encoded as subject, whereas prepositional and second pas- sives such as The book was given (to) me place the theme in subject position. In this way prepositional and second passives are functionally complementary to first pas- sives. Beyond a growing preference for personal subjects the spread of first passives may also be due to their typical property of presenting the theme in clause-final posi- tion, which is preferred whenever the theme provides new information or is meant to receive unmarked stress (compare Quirk et al. 1985: 1391). Whichever factor may have been the dominant one, it is clear that the attested rise of first passives in CanE brought with it a growing relative percentage of predicate-final themes and of benefi- ciaries as subjects. There is currently nothing to suggest that AmE or BrE should not
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176 Matthias L.G. Meyer
run basically parallel in this development but this deserves additional study as the timelines of such a change may well be different and we would need to know which variety of English might be leading it. In any case the recession of second passives in CanE and their rarity in Present-day AmE suggests that English is heading towards a greater regularisation of dual-complement passives in favour of tying theme subjects exclusively to the prepositional construction and beneficiaries as subject exclusively to the direct construction.
References
Aarts, Flor & Aarts, Jan. 1982. English Syntactic Structures: Functions and Categories in Sentence Analysis. New York NY: Prentice Hall.
Atkinson, Dwight. 1996. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675–1975: A sociohistorical discourse analysis. Language in Society 25(3): 333–371.
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Basilico, David. 2008. Particle verbs and benefactive double objects in English: High and low attachments. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 26(4): 731–773.
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Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Brunner, Karl. 1962. Die Englische Sprache II. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London: Longman.
Denison, David. 1998. Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Suzanne Romaine (ed), 92–329. Cambridge: CUP.
Gerwin, Johanna. 2014. Ditransitives in British English Dialects. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110352320
Gustafsson, Larisa Oldireva. 2006. The passive in nineteenth-century scientific writing.
In Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and Change, Merja Kytử, Mats Ryden & Erik Smitterberg (eds), 110–135. Cambridge: CUP.
Haddican, William. 2010. Theme-goal ditransitives and theme passivisation in British English dialects. Lingua 120(10): 2424–2443. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2009.11.003
Hart, John. 1864. A Grammar of the English Language. Philadelphia PA: E.H. Butler & Co.
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Herbst, Thomas, Heath, David, Roe, Ian & Gửtz, Dieter. 2004. A Valency Dictionary of English:
A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Complementation Patterns of English Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110892581
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Jensen, Svenja. 2013. The Complements of Clausal Idioms and Collocations Governed by Get, Give, Hold, Make and Take as Test Cases for Syntactic Theory. BA Thesis, University of Kiel.
Jespersen, Otto. 1961 [1927]. Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part III: Syntax, Second Volume. London: George Allen & Unwin (reprint of first edition by Ejnar Munks- gaard, Copenhagen).
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18: 1–16, 206–222 (published in two sections). DOI: 10.1080/00138383608596641 Kirchner, Gustav. 1937. The verbs with direct and indirect object re-examined: Conclusion.
English Studies 19: 97–112. DOI: 10.1080/00138383708596662
Klọber, Friedrich. 1950. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Health.
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in Contem- porary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511642210 Maitland, Frederic W. 1906. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth. 〈https://
archive.org/details/lifeandlettersl01goog〉
Meyer, Matthias L. G. 2009. Revisiting the evidence for objects in English. In Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 37], Ute Rửmer & Rainer Schulze (eds), 211–227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/scl.35.14mey
Onions, Charles T. 1904. An Advanced English Syntax. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Meyer, Matthias L.G. 12 Jan. 2012. Passivisable-Object Theory and Canadian English. 〈www.
queensu.ca/strathy/blog2012/guest11-12/meyer.html〉 (27 July 2013).
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2007. Functional constraints in syntactic change: The rise and fall of prep- ositional constructions in Early and Late Modern English. English Studies 88(3): 217–233.
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Rohdenburg, Günter. 2009b. Grammatical divergence between British and American English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Current Issues in Late Modern English, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade & Wim Van der Wurff (eds), 301–329. Bern: Peter Lang.
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2012. Eine Sprache, zwei Grammatiken? In Sprachmythen: Fiktion oder Wirklichkeit?, Lieselotte Anderwald (ed.), 139–160. Bern: Peter Lang.
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doi 10.1075/scl.67.08pet
© 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company
Dual adverbs in Australian English
Pam Peters
Macquarie University
Dual or dual-form adverbs are those found with and without the -ly suffix in modern English (e.g. deep/deeply), providing alternative forms for adverbial constituents or modifiers within the clause. But research on British English has shown decreasing numbers of fully interchangeable pairs. This paper investigates five dual adverbs in 19th and 20th century Australian English, examining their syntactic behaviour in writing as well as transcribed speech and scripted dialogue. Parallel data from the Australian and British ICE corpora, as well as custom-built mini-corpora of 19th century Australian and British English (news and narrative texts) are compared, showing far more zero forms in 19th century Australian data than a century later, and lower levels of use altogether in the British data.
Keywords: dual adverbs; zero adverb; -ly adverb; Australian English;
British English
1. Introduction
The existence of two forms for certain English adverbs such as quick/quickly, slow/
slowly, high/highly (with and without a suffix) has been registered in grammatical com- mentaries on the English language for the last three centuries. The two forms have coexisted for much longer than this, with some (e.g. high/highly) attested since the 10th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records. For others, includ- ing quick(ly), close(ly), the OED record for both forms of the adverb begins in Middle English. In fact the suffixless or ‘zero’ adverbs of modern English were formed with an -e suffix in Old English (OE), but clearly distinguishable from the OE forms inflected with -liche, now the modern -ly. The term ‘dual-form adverb’, coined by Donner (1991) provides a convenient label for referring to these pairs, compacted to ‘dual adverbs’ in this paper. While the suffixed form is straightforwardly known as the -ly adverb, the suffixless adverb goes by less widely understood names, e.g. ‘flat adverb’, used mostly in the US (Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1989), and ‘simple adverb’, used by Biber et al. (1999) to refer to any suffixless adverb including those with no alternative
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180 Pam Peters
-ly form, such as besides, soon, thus. Those terms are avoided here in favour of the morphologist’s term ‘zero’ adverb, which presupposes an alternative, suffixed form.1
Corpus-based research by Nevalainen (1994) shows that the -ly forms became increasingly frequent during Early Modern English. The homomorphy of the zero adverb with the plain form of the adjective prompted critical comments by early British grammarians such as Lowth (1762: 125), in line with their general preference for maintaining morphologically distinct forms for different grammatical function (Leonard 1962: 59–61, 70–73). Natural occurrences of the zero adverb (especially in speech) were taken as erroneous use of the adjective, as in some prescriptive usage guides from the later 20th century (e.g. Partridge 1947[1965/1994]).2 In major English grammars, the discussion still tends to focus on the formal coincidence between zero adverbs and homomorphic adjectives, rather than the two types of adverb.
The fact that some zero adverbs tend to collocate with particular verbs is discussed by Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 263–264) as idiomatic, although there are many col- locational possibilities beyond those they present as “more or less fixed phrases or idioms”. An alternative approach would allow that zero adverbs add to the variety of syntactic structures within ‘complement’ clauses, some of which may be analysed as SVA rather than SVC structures.3 The same applies to the complex transitive construc- tion SVOC,4 where the final constituent is typically a nominal or adjectival comple- ment to the object, though may in some cases be an adverbial complement to the verb (i.e. SVOA) as Opdahl (2000 v.1: 61) suggests.
The legitimacy of analysing any adverb as complement in copular clauses (e.g.
They’re here) has long been debated. Quirk et al. (1985: 730–733) argue for the SVA analysis at least with spatial adverbs in which the complement answers the question
‘where?’. This issue arises with a zero adverb as in They were close (i.e. ‘nearby’), just as it would with They were close by, or a prepositional paraphrase as in They were in the vicinity. Prepositional complements for copular verbs such as be, seem, appear are far less common than NPs or AdjP as complements (Biber et al. 1999: 437, 447–450).
1. Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (1994): zero … representing the absence of any realisation, where there theoretically could be, or in comparable grammatical contexts there is, a morphological or syntactic realisation.
2. In Usage and Abusage (1965), Partridge comments that using an adjective for an adverb is “an illiteracy, though even a tolerably educated person may, in a slovenly moment, fall into such an error”.
3. SVA (subject-verb-adverbial adjunct) and SVC (subject-verb-complement) are distin- guished throughout this paper, as in Quirk et al. (1985).
4. SVOC is Quirk et al.’s initialism for subject-verb-object-complement, and SVOA for subject-verb-object-adverbial adjunct.